Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | MrsWilkins)

Verizon Wireless customers this week noticed that Netflix's speed test tool appears to be capped at 10Mbps, raising fears that the carrier is throttling video streaming on its mobile network.

When contacted by Ars this morning, Verizon acknowledged using a new video optimization system but said it is part of a temporary test and that it did not affect the actual quality of video. The video optimization appears to apply both to unlimited and limited mobile plans.

But some YouTube users are reporting degraded video, saying that using a VPN service can bypass the Verizon throttling. The Federal Communications Commission generally allows mobile carriers to limit video quality as long as the limitations are imposed equally across different video services despite net neutrality rules that outlaw throttling. The net neutrality rules have exceptions for network management.

Enlarge / Yahoogle.

Google's homepage has been a stark white page for basically ever, with little more than a search box and a few buttons to get users to a search results page as fast as possible. Yesterday, a report from The Guardian claimed this would be changing, and Google would be adding a "news feed" to "Google.com." The Google app on mobile devices has long had a news feed—originally introduced as "Google Now"—and the report claims a similar interface is coming to the desktop.

The crux of The Guardian's report says "The feed of personalised information, which has been a mainstay of Google’s mobile apps for Android and iOS since 2012... will become part of the main desktop experience in the near future, the Guardian understands." But there are a few aspects of the report that make me question its authenticity.

First, the report pulls quotes and images from Google's July 19 blog post about news feed upgrades, but Google's post was only speaking about the mobile site and apps, and The Guardian's report doesn't make that clear. Second, the report contains an error in the title and lede: "Google to radically change homepage for first time since 1996," the report reads. "Google’s famously simple homepage with its logo and single search box on a white background is set to undergo a radical change for the first time since its launch in 1996, with the addition of Google’s interest and news-based feed."

Enlarge (credit: Kate Evans for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR))

We’re trashing the world not because it’s fun, but because it pays to do so. People respond to financial incentives. So, how do you provide an incentive to stop trashing the world? One idea is to use cold, hard cash. If people earn more by not trashing, the thinking goes, the incentive flips: it suddenly pays to conserve. Based on this idea, a trial program in Uganda paid landowners to preserve the forest on their land and tracked the results.

It turned out not to be so simple—people don’t always neatly do what they’re supposed to. What if these landowners were already concerned about deforestation and were already preserving their land? You’ve just forked out quite a bit to pay for something that was already going to happen. Or what if they just cut down trees elsewhere instead? Figuring out whether the benefits of the program are worth the cost requires collecting a lot of data.

A paper in Science this week reports on the results, which are encouraging: deforestation slowed to about half the previous rate, and it looks as though people didn’t just shift their forest clearing elsewhere. The program benefits seem to have outweighed the costs, whichever way you slice it. In other words, money provides a great incentive to preserve habitats, which is great news for climate change efforts.

Enlarge / Love it or hate it, Mario Kart's director see the blue shell is a necessary part of the Mario Kart formula. (credit: YouTube / ZaziNombies)

Since its introduction in Mario Kart 64, the blue shell has become a universal shorthand for the perils of video game rubber-banding; an item I called "scourge of the skillful and the great white hope of the novice" in my own Mario Kart 8 review. Targeting the first-place player with a nigh-unstoppable projectile from anywhere on the course is a perfect encapsulation of the series' focus on giving everyone playing a chance rather than letting pure racing skill win the day by default.

Love it or hate it, the blue shell is a necessary part of the game, according to Mario Kart 7 and 8 director Kosuke Yabuki. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Yabuki said Mario Kart just doesn't feel like Mario Kart without the item.

"We're always experimenting with what new elements to introduce or what elements can be removed," Yabuki told the site. "We have tried—or we are trying—to see what the game's like without the blue shell. When we've experimented without the blue shell, actually it feels like something's missing. Like there's something not quite enough in the game. So for now we've kept it in."

Enlarge / Crater water ice on Mars at Vastitas Borealis, seen by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. (credit: ESA)

This week we all had a good laugh at the expense of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who asked NASA scientists during a committee hearing whether it was possible that a civilization existed on Mars thousands of years ago. "Would you rule that out?" he asked. "See, there's some people... Well, anyway."

Rohrabacher is an interesting figure in Washington, whose once-idiosyncratic views seem largely in vogue with those of the new administration. Politico called Rohrabacher "Putin's favorite Congressman" in a mini-profile last year. Like Trump, the Congressman has also has called climate change a hoax. In a 2014 letter to President Obama, Rohrabacher wrote, "Mr. President, we both know I have referred to the theory of man-made global warming as a 'hoax,' and, yes, I once used to the phrase 'dinosaur flatulence' as a soft jab at what I considered to be climate alarmism."

So after Rohrabacher's question—which seemed driven by some arcane conspiracy theory given his use of "some people"—it was curious that one of his few defenders was a well known climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt. "To be fair, NASA astrobiology is very interested in this (and similar) questions. Not sure why it's out-of-bounds to ask," the NASA climate modeler wrote on Twitter.